10/24/2014

What you are about to read should be front-page news in every newspaper in the country tomorrow. You know it won’t be — but I want you to treat it as that important . . . because it is. Jesse Richman and David Earnest write in the Washington Post:

Could control of the Senate in 2014 be decided by illegal votes cast by non-citizens? Some argue that incidents of voting by non-citizens are so rare as to be inconsequential, with efforts to block fraud a screen for an agenda to prevent poor and minority voters from exercising the franchise, while others define such incidents as a threat to democracy itself. Both sides depend more heavily on anecdotes than data.

In a forthcoming article in the journal Electoral Studies, we bring real data from big social science survey datasets to bear on the question of whether, to what extent, and for whom non-citizens vote in U.S. elections. Most non-citizens do not register, let alone vote. But enough do that their participation can change the outcome of close races.

Our data comes from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES). Its large number of observations (32,800 in 2008 and 55,400 in 2010) provide sufficient samples of the non-immigrant sub-population, with 339 non-citizen respondents in 2008 and 489 in 2010. For the 2008 CCES, we also attempted to match respondents to voter files so that we could verify whether they actually voted.

How many non-citizens participate in U.S. elections? More than 14 percent of non-citizens in both the 2008 and 2010 samples indicated that they were registered to vote. Furthermore, some of these non-citizens voted. Our best guess, based upon extrapolations from the portion of the sample with a verified vote, is that 6.4 percent of non-citizens voted in 2008 and 2.2 percent of non-citizens voted in 2010.

This is astonishing — but Richman and Earnest fail to convey just how astonishing it is . . . because they don’t explain how many people they are talking about.

Allow me to remedy that.

The progressive think tank Center for American Progress puts the number of noncitizens in the U.S. at 22.1 million in 2012. Of these, “13.3 million were legal permanent residents, 11.3 million were unauthorized migrants, and 1.9 million were on temporary visas.” These numbers are roughly consistent with numbers offered by the Department of Homeland Security (.pdf) and Kaiser Health News. So let’s take 22 million as our number of noncitizens.

Richman and Earnest estimate that 6.4% of noncitizens voted in 2008. 6.4% of 22 million is 1,408,000.

That’s 1.4 million illegal votes likely cast in the presidential election of 2008.

Richman and Earnest also estimate that 2.2% of noncitizens voted in 2010. (In off-year elections, such as 2010 and the approaching election in 2014, turnout is obviously lower.) 2.2% of 22 million is 484,000. That’s nearly half a million illegal votes likely cast in the election of 2010 (and the same number could be cast in the upcoming election).

How important is this? Richman and Earnest say:

Because non-citizens tended to favor Democrats (Obama won more than 80 percent of the votes of non-citizens in the 2008 CCES sample), we find that this participation was large enough to plausibly account for Democratic victories in a few close elections. Non-citizen votes could have given Senate Democrats the pivotal 60th vote needed to overcome filibusters in order to pass health-care reform and other Obama administration priorities in the 111th Congress.

I don’t like to say I told you so, but . . . ah, hell. Y’all know I actually love to say I told you so. And I have, repeatedly. In November 2008, I cited reports that huge increases in Latino voter registration had accompanied huge increases in illegal immigrant populations, and argued that this was probably not a coincidence. As I said then:

It certainly seems logically possible that there were hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of illegal votes cast in this past election. If this is true, it is possible that illegal immigrants decided this election.

If Richman and Earnest are correct, there may well have been hundreds of thousands, indeed almost a million and a half, votes cast by noncitizens (including legal residents who may not vote in federal elections, as well as illegals). And I argued in 2010:

Over time, as our population increases, your vote becomes worth less and less. This problem is exacerbated by factors such as voter fraud. Oh, I know: the liberals all assure us that there is no such thing. But let’s just take one likely rich vein of illegal votes: votes cast by illegal immigrants. What’s that, you say? Votes cast by illegal immigrants? Yes. Estimates say that there are anywhere from 10 million to 18 million illegal immigrants in the country. This means millions are of voting age. What’s more, many of them are experts at obtaining false documents, allowing them to work, drive, and participate in all other aspects of civic life. Do we really think that none of them vote? None? Let’s go with a conservative estimate of 10,000,000 illegal immigrants. If only one percent of them vote — just one percent! — that’s 100,000 illegal votes. That is voter fraud on a massive scale — certainly enough to tip a close election. This sort of thing dilutes your vote.

One percent? In 2010, Richman and Earnest say it was more than two percent, and in 2008 it was more than six percent. And again, I overlooked the population of legal noncitizen permanent residents, which more than doubles the number of people we are talking about. But, although my numbers were conservative, I will modestly concede that I totally nailed the main point — which is: hundreds of thousands of illegal votes are potentially being cast in every federal election, and nobody talks about it.

Always trust content from Patterico.

P.S. I can’t leave this post without noting this by Richman and Earnest:

We also find that one of the favorite policies advocated by conservatives to prevent voter fraud appears strikingly ineffective. Nearly three quarters of the non-citizens who indicated they were asked to provide photo identification at the polls claimed to have subsequently voted.

Really? That’s “strikingly ineffective”? (Well, yeah, it could be a lot better. But read on.)

The converse of that is that more than a quarter of the people who were asked for voter ID did not vote. We’re not told how many of the 1.4 million who voted illegally in the 2008 election were asked for IDs, but if voter ID laws were in effect in all 50 states, rather than only about 15 states, we might see over 25% of 1.4 million illegal votes prevented in a presidential election. That’s over 350,000 illegal votes that could potentially be prevented by voter ID laws.

This is hugely important, folks. Bookmark this post, right now. The next time people try to tell you there is no such thing as voter fraud, I want you to take this link and shove it right down their throats.

P.P.S. The authors do say: “Finally, extrapolation to specific state-level or district-level election outcomes is fraught with substantial uncertainty.” We can’t know for sure whether the extrapolation I present here is overstated, understated, or completely accurate. But one thing we can say: despite the false claims by the left, there is definitely massive voter fraud occurring in every federal election.

51 Responses to “WaPo Publishes Scientific Evidence of Voter Fraud on a Massive Scale — As Previously Predicted By This Here Very Blog”

My father died on October 31, 2006. He is still on the voter rolls. Today, a jury duty summons came for him. Here’s the thing. An illegal won’t show up and vote in his name. The Democrat election judges at the precinct will be told how many votes they need to send in and they will vote in his name if necessary. This is Chicago.

A couple of related things-
– not long ago there was some study where the voter records of NC were compared with records from another 25 states or so, there were 35,000 duplicates for name and dob, and a number the same SSW# as well (the numbers may be not quite right, but the point is the same)
– Dick Morris has a radio show based in Philly, his claim is that “many Democrats really do think Repubs are trying to disenfranchise voters”, FWIW
– Have you seen the situation in Colorado where ballots are sent out to the entire public (sorry, don’t remember if to registered voters or all residents). That along with on-line and same day registration makes it pathetically simple for voter fraud. State Dems pushed the changes through to the protest of the AG (sorry, I may have confused some of the details, but the bottom line is correct)

So when I went to renew my California DL at the DMV last year (I returned to CA on an H1B visa ~15 years after I left at the expiration of the previous one) there was a form (part of the form?) that I could fill in to register to vote. I didn’t fill it in. The nice lady processing my renewal actually asked me whether I realized I had “forgotten” to fill that in. I had to explain that as a non-resident (but legal) alien I was not in fact entitled to vote…

Have you seen the situation in Colorado where ballots are sent out to the entire public (sorry, don’t remember if to registered voters or all residents). That along with on-line and same day registration makes it pathetically simple for voter fraud. State Dems pushed the changes through to the protest of the AG (sorry, I may have confused some of the details, but the bottom line is correct)

– people with legit drivers licenses they received via a green card. Once they are illegally registered, they won’t be stopped at the poll. They’ll have ID and a name on the roll.

– people who illegally register and who have driver’s licenses that match the name. The license may be illegal, too – or a fake. Again, ID will match name on the roll.

Also, it may be the case that if the person said they didn’t have ID, they were *allowed* to vote anyway. That is, the folks running the election either illegally allowed it, or they legally permitted it via a “provisional” ballot or something.

These are not the only sh*theel shenanigans that have been going on for years. The system is rotten and has been corrupted by the dishonest, criminal Democratic party machinery and their partners in crime the press pass holding Democrat operatives, aka the MSM. They should be in prison, the whole stinking lot of them.

There is going to be a tipping point where the infamous “silent majority” will rear its head. Watching the Dems steal control of the Senate, which is most definitely what is about to happen, coupled with the ever more outrageous actions by the Executive, just might do it. Ferguson will also be part of this potential eruption.

Yet, the Left will still insist there is no proof vote fraud because they just don’t see it. Of course, the fact that illegally voting is pretty easy (even with voter ID) just goes to show that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

A good look at the mindset of the Left when it comes to voter fraud can be seen here:

How inconvenient right before an election and President Stompy Foot takes action on immigration reform.

Yeah, but this hugely important and revelatory story will get absolutely zero traction in Big Media. The WaPo published it on a blog, to be sure, but whenever the issue of voter fraud comes up again, they’ll forget about it.

“Yeah, but this hugely important and revelatory story will get absolutely zero traction in Big Media.”

Patterico – Be nice if people could forward it to their Congresscritters asking why their state does not comply with its legal obligation to purge its voter rolls of ineligible voters and why Congress allows the DOJ to obstruct states performing that legally mandated task.

Exactly. Politicians won’t change (not without imprisonment or the guillotine, anyway). As long as the Democrat Party exists, democracy is impossible. Elections are shame which exist to quell dissent (“I won”).

“daleyrocks : Bad idea! Congress critters have little or no authority over internal state matters. It is like asking McDonald’s to make a change in a Wendy’s menu.”

Mike Keohane – Well, Section 8 of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 requires states to maintain accurate voter rolls through reasonable list maintenance procedures. The Civil Rights Section of the DOJ has had an active policy of not enforcing those provisions of Section 8 and has in fact intervened with litigation to prevent several states from implementing ineligible voter purges or to prevent states from obtaining data they need, say from the Social Security Administration, to cross check with purported eligible voters before purging voters.

Raising awareness (bitching to) with members of Congress seems a good way heighten awareness of the issue and to encourage them to carry out their oversight activities.

This study is exploding all over the right-wing websites but I don’t think anyone bothered to actually read it. It really has nothing to do with voter fraud. The non-citizens voting were not ISIS operatives voting with stolen identities, but instead were non-citizens who went through the voter registration and voting process and were never “caught” by the system. Voter ID laws won’t stop that, as the authors of the study make clear twice. Its the states that are screwing up with haphazard voter registration processes that, apparently, don’t make it clear to registrants who can and can’t vote.

They say non-citizen voting could have flipped NC from McCain to Obama in 2008. Fine. Let’s give McCain NC’s five electoral votes; Obama still crushes him in the EC. If you really want to minimize the risk of voter fraud in the presidential elections the best thing we could do is get rid of the EC system entirely and go with a straight popular vote. This dilutes each individual vote even more and gets rid of swing states where voting shenanigans are most likely to pay off.

This study simply does not support the voter ID crowd… it shows that non-citizens who do vote illegally do so by going through the proper channels and voter ID won’t stop that.

This study simply does not support the voter ID crowd… it shows that non-citizens who do vote illegally do so by going through the proper channels and voter ID won’t stop that.
Sharon dear, there are no proper channels for illegal voters.

Why is it that every place they are having “calibration” errors with voting machines, the machines only change Republican votes into Democrat votes. Not the other way around. Why is that? What are the odds?

Why is it the only people convicted of voter fraud have been democrats? At least that’s what I found with my poor search skills.

The methodology of his study is seriously flawed- and it certainly doesn’t qualify as “scientific evidence” (I question whether Patterico even know what that actually means). The authors of the study seemed to have employed dozens of tricks that are described in “How to Lie With Statistics” by Darrell Huff. Anyone who is inclined to accept this- or any other study- without question should read it.

Red, for every shovel-ready job there are two hundred (200) spoon-ready jobs. As Krugman has so brilliantly pointed out, it doesn’t matter what you produce, it only matters that you get paid. So grab that soup spoon and report for duty! No excuses.

Please go to Old Dominion research that this is based on …..the sample size was under 1000 people between 2008 and 2010 elections and then is it prorated to total population…..I live in a highly hispanic area and have voted every since I was 18.
I have not seen any evidence of a non citizen voting

The converse of that is that more than a quarter of the people who were asked for voter ID did not vote. We’re not told how many of the 1.4 million who voted illegally in the 2008 election were asked for IDs, but if voter ID laws were in effect in all 50 states, rather than only about 15 states, we might see over 25% of 1.4 million illegal votes prevented in a presidential election. That’s over 350,000 illegal votes that could potentially be prevented by voter ID laws.

Right, cuz everyone knows no non-citizens have photo IDs. And by “no non-citizens” I mean all legal aliens, most semi-legal “deferred” ones and lord knows how many full-blown illegals. Photo IDs are proof of identity, not eligibility.

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